The Smoky City

By a stroke of luck, this model of my dad’s somehow stayed with my own collection of trains when I moved out on my own after high school, and thus escaped the auction of many of my dad’s trains from his storage unit. Still, it has had a rough life. I have a clear memory from sometime in the early 80s of my dad, brother and me being surprised that it still worked after I was allowed to play with it for quite some time, off the tracks, as if it were a toy. I remember my dad or brother saying, “It’s a miracle!”, and then expressing my delight and surprise by repeating the phrase myself, over and over again. I was less than ten years old at the time. My memory of this model between that point and when I took my own collection with me is basically gone, but by that point, it had sustained damages on several parts:

• Missing draw bar in back (for coupling multiple units)
• Broken/missing draw bar pin on front
• Missing trolley pole spring
• Missing trolley pole retention post
• Broken and glue-smeared window plastic
• Damaged passenger silhouettes in windows
• Cracked chassis
• Missing headlight bulb

Continue Reading →

My dad had one of these models in the late 70s, and it always seemed like a very good runner, with six pick-up and drive wheels on each truck, and a flywheel. Of all of the models in our house, this was the only one with a flywheel. Sometime in the late 80s or early 90s, something went wrong with this engine, possibly a short. It ran slowly and got too hot, eventually melting some of the plastic around the motor, rendering it useless. I later removed the gearing so that it could be pulled as a dummy, and I’m not sure what ever happened to it after that.

I found this same model, with upgraded details, at a good price on eBay last year. It runs just as well, or better, as the one my dad had. The previous owner, who had a B&N layout, had a friend of his add some details, including a new motor and flywheels, Kadee knuckle couplers, a flashing cab roof beacon, MU cables, a fuel tank breather pipe, painted hand rails, new number boards (white lettering on black background), and two parts that I can’t remember the name of (two things that on …

Continue Reading →

Another train that my dad had put together in the late 70s was a series of short passenger cars made by Roundhouse, pulled by an 0-4-0 with slope-back tender made by Model Power. The cars were non-prototypical “Overton” passenger cars built from undecorated kits by Roundhouse. They were shorter than normal passenger cars, but they looked about right for a short line or mountain railroad, and I think they looked okay pulled by the equally short locomotive. One of the things I liked about this model as a kid was the fact that it featured a smoke unit. None of our other HO scale trains did, except for my brother’s short-lived Tyco Chattanooga steam engine. My brother and I called this one “Poppers” because of the way the smoke fluid would occasionally sputter or “pop” out of the smoke stack. My search for a smoking version of this model turned up absolutely nothing. I have a vague recollection of this model coming in a blue Model Power box that had graphics indicating that it was a smoking locomotive, but I have doubts about that memory, because I’ve seen nothing like that on eBay. What I did find is that a …

Continue Reading →

In the late 70s, my dad put together a B&O train consisting of seven Athearn “blue box” heavyweight passenger cars pulled by a blue Mantua 4-6-2 Pacific. He built the cars a couple at a time from kits, upgraded with Kadee couplers and a lighted drum head on the observation car. The engine was a gift to him from my mom. It was the best rolling stock of my dad’s HO collection. Sometime in the early or mid-80s, the family had switched from HO scale to O gauge, and my dad’s HO collection sat in boxes until I got a little older and was allowed to use all of it on my own layouts, except for this set. Using that set required special permission, which I think was only granted temporarily. I’m sure he was proud of the work and money that went into it, and wanted to keep them in good condition. Despite this, I remember that set being basically useless at some point when the draw bar between the locomotive and tender broke, and the coupler on the tender broke. By the time I was a teenager, I wanted to repair it as a favor to my dad …

Continue Reading →